On Wednesday, a nor’easter kept Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison from giving the keynote speech at the 33rd annual Whiting Awards ceremony at the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan. Thankfully, Mellon Foundation President (and President Barack Obama’s first-inaugural poet) Elizabeth Alexander was on hand to read her prepared remarks in a pair of fur-topped snow boots.

“I’ve been given a very unusual task,” Alexander said. “The queen has given me her new words.” Morrison’s prepared speech addressed the difficulties faced by young writers who want to create work that the world doesn’t seem to have room for. “I wanted to read a book that did not exist, because it could not exist,” Morrison said through Alexander, as part of her advice to the young writers receiving their awards that evening. Afterward, board member Amanda Foreman awarded each of the 10 winners with a book, as well as some kind words, from the anonymous six-judge panel that chose them.

The Whiting Award is given annually to writers in early stages of their career after a grueling judging process. The award has a strong track record for finding greats before they are famous—David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis,Michael Cunningham,Sarah Ruhl, and Denis Johnson were all early recipients—and has earned a reputation for having an uncanny ability to predict the future of literature. The award honors a mix of poets, playwrights, fiction, and nonfiction writers, bringing together a group of people who usually might not come to know each other’s work.

“We try to pole-vault across Manhattan and into America, looking for talent that the literary world might miss,” said Courtney Hodell, director of literary programs for the Whiting Foundation. She said the program looks for writers who are already exemplary at their craft, but need some financial support to focus on their work.

The evening started with a wine reception in the Historical Society’s library, where the award winners took a group picture under the watchful eye of George Washington’s portrait.

Award winner Nathan Alan Davis, a playwright who focuses on African-American history, said he was happy be recognized for his writing. He was there with his partner and three young daughters, one of whom was curled around his leg as he talked to fellow winner Hansol Jung, another playwright, who was wearing a pastel yellow crêpe dress for the occasion, about his upcoming project, a play about the Tulsa community known as “black Wall Street” in the 1920s.

Jung and Davis already knew each other because they were both awarded a 2050 Fellowship from the New York Theatre Workshop in 2015. Otherwise, many of the award winners, who will meet again throughout the year, were meeting for the first time. But they already displayed a friendly familiarity with each other, because of the summer-camp like environment of the three-day celebration.

Award winner Brontez Purnell was quickly emerging as a popular figure in the group, showing his counterparts a transfixing video of marijuana processing, and talking about the graduate program he would be starting at U.C. Berkeley in the the fall. A performance artist and novelist, he broke into a jog when he accepted his award—a Tennessee Williams book—in a fresh pair of Timberlands.

The fellows were informed that they won the award in January by telephone, and were asked to keep it a secret until this week. “Nobody calls on the phone these days. When I saw the unknown number, I was Googling it to make sure it was real!” said Weike Wang, whose debut novel Chemistry, a incisive and humorous look at life in the laboratory sciences, came out on Knopf. She accepted her award—a collection of Vladimir Nabokov’s writing—in a black velvet dress with a lace inset.

Keeping the secret was difficult for Anne Boyer, a poet and nonfiction writer from Kansas, whose memoir, The Undying, will be released by Farrar, Straus & and Giroux in 2019. “I actually had to push back the deadline for turning in my manuscript because of this,” she said. She got to invite her friends to the ceremony, but she couldn’t tell them why they were going. Foreman hailed Boyer for “her searing passion and fierce wit,” and handed her a copy of the Library of America’s Susan Sontag collection as she crossed the stage.

After the short ceremony, revelers spent the rest of the evening in the Historical Society’s lobby, where screens projected excerpts of the winners’ writing. The winners mingled with figures from the New York literary scene: poet Stacy Szymaszek, Ugly Duckling Presse editor Anna Moschovakis, critic Rich Benjamin, and former Electric Literature editor-in-chief Lincoln Michel were in attendance. 2018 award winner Tommy Pico, who Foreman said writes “poetry of rare brilliance,” is already a well-regarded figure in Brooklyn’s poetry scene, and he was surrounded by a group of excited friends. Award winner Patty Yumi Cottrell, whose first novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace won an Independent Publisher Book Award and the Barnes and Noble Discover award in 2017, invited her roommates to celebrate with her, along with writer Sarah Gerard.

It was a gathering perfect for unexpected interactions between the award winners and already prominent writers. Helen MacDonald, author of the memoir H Is for Hawk, flagged Purnell down and, with wide eyes, said, “I love your work!”

Purnell was incredulous. “You’ve read my work!” The two exchanged a kiss on the cheek, and Purnell went off to the bar with writer and activist Kenyon Farrow for another round.

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